Why Anime Fans Aren't Falling In Love With Anime Strike

Anime, the multigenre selection of animated cartoons made in Japan, is big business.

Crunchyroll, a streaming service that focuses on nothing but anime, has garnered 1 million paying subscribers. Even general streaming services like Netflix have made significant inroads into the medium. Late last year Amazon, the titan of all things online shopping, became the newest contender in this not-so-little niche with its anime-only service, Anime Strike.

Thanks to Prime Video, Amazon is already a standout video service, with thousands of content offerings and a state-of-the-art video player. However, when it comes to serving a niche audience, it’s been one misstep after another. Here are some of the ways that Amazon and its Anime Strike customers simply aren’t seeing eye to eye yet.

A steep barrier to entry

Anime Strike is one of what Amazon calls “Channels,” add-on services that provide additional content to Prime Video for an additional $5 a month. So far, each Amazon Channel focuses on a specific niche. For example, in addition to Anime Strike, another channel is called Heera and is exclusively focused on Bollywood titles.

Five bucks a month is a small price to pay, but some anime fans have protested the model. Anime Strike can only be purchased if the customer already has an Amazon Prime subscription, which costs $100 a year, meaning a person who buys a year of Anime Strike will pay $160 in all.

Meanwhile, a subscription to Crunchyroll or Funimation costs $6.95 a month—and when customers buy 12 months at once, just $60 for a year. Additionally, both services have a free, ad-supported option, as does Daisuki, another streaming service that provides anime.

Despite the difference, fans are paying up. A spokesperson told me that Anime Strike is more successful than the company originally expected it to be, though declined to share the numbers.

“Anime Strike is performing great,” the spokesperson said. “Signups are higher than initial projections as we add more content and more features. Besides new episodes every week and new shows every season, we’ve been able to introduce new things that anime fans weren’t able to get before like the ability to download and watch thousands of episodes or movies on Anime Strike to their smartphone and tablet (which is awesome for anyone who’ll be traveling a lot this summer) or a free manga every month from ComiXology.”

Big bucks for exclusive rewards

Why, despite the steeper price, is Anime Strike doing so well? It’s all about exclusives—when it comes to both content and features. Amazon is the first anime streaming service to allow customers to download shows for offline viewing (a move that prompted Crunchyroll to promise the same feature within 2017). And while a spokesperson declined to share details about Anime Strike’s financial and licensing terms, it’s clear that the company has had money to spend on obtaining exclusive rights to new anime—so for a select number of currently airing anime, Americans can watch them on Anime Strike and nowhere else.

It’s an insular move in a market that has recently become more open-ended. Last fall, Crunchyroll and Funimation developed a partnership to share their entire, extensive libraries. This meant anything previously exclusive to Funimation could also now be viewed on Crunchyroll, and vice versa, either for pay or on an ad-supported free service.

Amazon goes in the other direction. If fans aren’t willing to pay up to watch shows on Anime Strike, they won’t be able to watch them at all. This is a great business move, but a spokesperson described this as a decision to paradoxically benefit fans by putting anime “all in one place” on a “separate channel.”

“There’s a really passionate group of fans who love anime content and want it all in one place—and to do that it made sense to create a separate, curated channel offering more anime content than what can be found on Prime Video,” the spokesperson said.

Fans with different priorities

“Passionate” is the right word for anime fans. Before I sent interview questions to Anime Strike, I queried fans over Twitter. Two questions stood out thanks to sheer volume: will there ever be a free, ad-supported way to watch Anime Strike without the perceived double paywall? And, what’s the international plan for Anime Strike? Will it be available outside of North America?

However, neither of these questions got an answer fans will be satisfied with.

“We always listen to customer feedback, but right now this isn’t something we’re looking at,” the spokesperson said, adding, “We’re constantly looking to innovate for our customers all over the world, but don’t have specific details to share at this time.”

Additionally, a spokesperson was unable to answer questions about how Anime Strike chooses which shows to license, its relationships with Japanese anime producers, or whether exclusive shows will be available on Prime, DVD, or Blu Ray when they are finished airing.

Anime Strike is unable to answer fans’ most burning questions, but the service has made a cursory effort to start meeting fans on their own turf. The company put up a photo booth at Sakura-Con, a Pacific Northwest anime convention with 23,000 attendees on average.

“We had a great time connecting with our audiences at Sakura-Con, and we’re exploring more opportunities to do cool things for fans through ComiXology and Twitch and other events that contribute to the community,” a spokesperson said, referencing Amazon’s partnerships with a comics publisher and a live video platform popularized by gamers.

All this said, I’m one anime fan who is an Anime Strike subscriber, and no, I didn’t get a discount because I wrote about them. Since I have already subscribed to Amazon Prime for years, it was a matter of an additional $60 to my yearly spending budget, not $160. Though I had my concerns about this new player in the market, I simply couldn’t resist the exclusive shows.

Like it or not, Anime Strike is primed to become a major part of the anime streaming landscape. Despite these early missteps, Anime Strike is optimistic that it can serve passionate fans’ needs. After all, it has those higher-than-expected early sales as evidence.

“We’re still very early—we’re just four months in—but we just unveiled downloads, our library keeps getting deeper and better as we learn what people are viewing, we rolled out free monthly manga with ComiXology, and we see more exciting opportunities to partner with Twitch to benefit all fans,” a spokesperson said.